The Power of Nightmares assesses whether
the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is
an illusionarticle12642.htm. In the concluding part of the series, the programme explains how the illusion was created and who
benefits from it.

This is
a must watch documentary - Broadcast
11/03/04 BBC 2 - Written and produced by Adam Curtis

NOTE
by Mike Conley: Portions of the audio are difficult to
understand; where possible, I provide my best guess at the
actual words spoken, and precede them with a {?} indicator.

VO: In
the past, politicians promised to create a better world.
They had different ways of achieving this. But their power
and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered
to their people. Those dreams failed. And today, people have
lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen
simply as managers of public life. But now, they have
discovered a new role that restores their power and
authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now
promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they
will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and
do not understand. And the greatest danger of all is
international terrorism. A powerful and sinister network,
with sleeper cells in countries across the world. A threat
that needs to be fought by a war on terror. But much of this
threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and
distorted by politicians. It�s a dark illusion that has
spread unquestioned through governments around the world,
the security services, and the international media.

VO: This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy
was created, and who it benefits. At the heart of the story
are two groups: the American neoconservatives, and the
radical Islamists. Last week’s episode ended in the late
‘90s with both groups marginalized and out of power. But
with the attacks of September 11th, the fates of both
dramatically changed. The Islamists, after their moment of
triumph, were virtually destroyed within months, while the
neoconservatives took power in Washington. But then, the
neoconservatives began to reconstruct the Islamists. They
created a phantom enemy. And as this nightmare fantasy began
to spread, politicians realized the newfound power it gave
them in a deeply disillusioned age. Those with the darkest
nightmares became the most powerful.

[ OPENING TITLES : THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES / THE RISE OF THE
POLITICS OF FEAR / THE SHADOWS IN THE CAVE ]

[ TITLE: AFGHANISTAN 1998 ]

VO: At the end of the 1990s, Osama bin Laden had returned to
Afghanistan. He was accompanied by Ayman Zawahiri, the most
influential ideologist of the Islamist movement. For 20
years, Zawahiri had struggled to create revolutions in the
Arab world, but all attempt had ended in bloody failure.

[ EXCERPT , CNN EXCLUSIVE VIDEO ]

INTERVIEWER (in Arabic, English subtitles): We haven’t had
any information about your whereabouts for some time. Where
were you?

AYMAN ZAWAHIRI: {?} I was just home and clubs.

INTERVIEWER: Not in Afghanistan? Somewhere else?

ZAWAHIRI: Everywhere, everywhere.

INTERVIEWER : Everywhere?

ZAWAHIRI: I am a Muslim. Being a Muslim, you are wanted
everywhere. Because if you—just if you say no to the
superpowers, this immediately in itself is a crime you are
wanted for.

INTERVIEWER: {?} Yes, but isn’t what you do not to do with
arms?

ZAWAHIRI: {?} It�s aggressive but ask Allah, and he is
greater than superpower.

VO: Zawahiri was a follower of the Egyptian revolutionary,
Sayyed Qutb, who had been executed in 1966. Qutb’s vision
had been of a new type of modern state. It would contain all
of the benefits of Western science and technology, but it
would use Islam as a moral framework to protect people from
the culture of Western liberalism. Qutb believed that this
culture infected the minds of Muslims, turning them into
selfish creatures who threatened to destroy the shared
values that held society together. Throughout the 80s and
90s, Zawahiri had tried to persuade the masses to rise up
and topple the rulers who had allowed this corruption to
infect their countries.

[ EXCERPT , VIDEOTAPE OF SADAT ASSASSINATION ]

[ CUT TO AYMAN ZAWAHIRI IN EGYPTIAN COURTROOM CELL ]

ZAWAHIRI [haranguing courtroom]: We want to speak to the
whole world. Who are we?

VO: But the revolutionaries became trapped in a horrific
escalation of violence, because the masses refused to follow
them. Islamism failed as a mass movement, and Zawahiri now
came to the conclusion that a new strategy was needed.

GILLES KEPEL , HISTORIAN OF ISLAMIST MOVEMENT: They had no
revolution at all. I mean, they had failed in their
takeover, they had failed to topple the powers that be, and,
you know, they became more and more interested in this idea
that only a small vanguard could be successful. I mean, they
had lost confidence in the spontaneous capacity of the
masses to be mobilised. Then they decided to change strategy
completely, and instead of striking at what they called the
“near enemy”—i.e., the local régimes—they decided that they
could strike at the “far away enemy”—i.e., at the West, at
America—and that would impress the masses, and the masses
would be mobilised.

[ TITLE : NAIROBI , AUGUST 1998 ]

VO: Zawahiri and bin Laden began implementing this new
strategy in August, 1998. Two huge suicide bombs were
detonated outside American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,
killing more than 200 people. The bombings had a dramatic
effect on the West. For the first time, the name “bin Laden”
entered the public consciousness as a terrorist mastermind.

[ CUT TO AFGHANISTAN ]

VO: The suicide bombers had been recruited by bin Laden from
the Islamist training camps in Afghanistan. But his and
Zawahiri’s operation was very much on the fringes of the
Islamist movement. The overwhelming majority of the fighters
in these camps had nothing at all to do with bin Laden or
international terrorism. They were training to fight régimes
in their own countries, such as Uzbekistan, Kashmir, and
Chechnia. Their aim was to establish Islamist societies in
the Western world, and they had no interest in attacking
America. Bin Laden helped fund some of the camps, and in
return was allowed to look for volunteers for his
operations. But a number of senior Islamists were against
his new strategy, including members of Zawahiri’s own group,
Islamic Jihad.

VO: Even bin Laden’s displays of strength to the Western
media were faked. The fighters in this video had been hired
for the day and told to bring their own weapons. For beyond
this small group, bin Laden had no formal organisation—until
the Americans invented one for him.

[ CUT TO MANHATTAN CITYSCAPE ]

[ TITLE : MANHATTAN , JANUARY 2001 ]

VO: In January, 2001, a trial began in a Manhattan courtroom
of four men accused of the embassy bombings in east Africa.
But the Americans had also decided to prosecute bin Laden in
his absence. But to do this under American law, the
prosecutors needed evidence of a criminal organisation
because, as with the Mafia, that would allow them to
prosecute the head of the organisation even if he could not
be linked directly to the crime. And the evidence for that
organisation was provided for them by an ex-associate of bin
Laden’s called Jamal al-Fadl.

JASON BURKE , AUTHOR, “AL QAEDA” : During the investigation
of the 1998 bombings, there is a walk-in source, Jamal al-Fadl,
who is a Sudanese militant who was with bin Laden in the
early 90s, who has been passed around a whole series of
Middle East secret services, none of whom want much to do
with him, and who ends up in America and is taken on
by—uh—the American government, effectively, as a key
prosecution witness and is given a huge amount of American
taxpayers’ money at the same time. And his account is used
as raw material to build up a picture of Al Qaeda. The
picture that the FBI want to build up is one that will fit
the existing laws that they will have to use to prosecute
those responsible for the bombing. Now, those laws were
drawn up to counteract organised crime: the Mafia, drugs
crime, crimes where people being a member of an organisation
is extremely important. You have to have an organisation to
get a prosecution. And you have al-Fadl and a number of
other witness, a number of other sources, who are happy to
feed into this. You’ve got material that, looked at in a
certain way, can be seen to show this organisation’s
existence. You put the two together and you get what is the
first bin Laden myth—the first Al Qaeda myth. And because
it’s one of the first, it’s extremely influential.

VO: The picture al-Fadl drew for the Americans of bin Laden
was of an all-powerful figure at the head of a large
terrorist network that had an organised network of control.
He also said that bin Laden had given this network a name:
“Al Qaeda.” It was a dramatic and powerful picture of bin
Laden, but it bore little relationship to the truth.

[ EXCERPT, CNN EXCLUSIVE VIDEO : BIN LADEN AND SOLDIERS ]

VO: The reality was that bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri had
become the focus of a loose association of disillusioned
Islamist militants who were attracted by the new strategy.
But there was no organisation. These were militants who
mostly planned their own operations and looked to bin Laden
for funding and assistance. He was not their commander.
There is also no evidence that bin Laden used the term “Al
Qaeda” to refer to the name of a group until after September
the 11th, when he realized that this was the term the
Americans have given it.

[ CUT TO MANHATTAN SKYLINE ]

VO: In reality, Jamal al-Fadl was on the run from bin Laden,
having stolen money from him. In return for his evidence,
the Americans gave him witness protection in America and
hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many lawyers at the trial
believed that al-Fadl exaggerated and lied to give the
Americans the picture of a terrorist organisation that they
needed to prosecute bin Laden.

SAM SCHMIDT , DEFENCE LAWYER EMBASSY BOMBINGS TRIAL: And
there were selective portions of al-Fadl’s testimony that I
believe was false, to help support the picture that he
helped the Americans join together. I think he lied in a
number of specific testimony about a unified image of what
this organisation was. It made Al Qaeda the new Mafia or the
new Communists. It made them identifiable as a group and
therefore made it easier to prosecute any person associated
with Al Qaeda for any acts or statements made by bin
Laden—who talked a lot.

BURKE : The idea—which is critical to the FBI’s
prosecution—that bin Laden ran a coherent organisation with
operatives and cells all around the world of which you could
be a member is a myth. There is no Al Qaeda organisation.
There is no international network with a leader, with cadres
who will unquestioningly obey orders, with tentacles that
stretch out to sleeper cells in America, in Africa, in
Europe. That idea of a coherent, structured terrorist
network with an organised capability simply does not exist.

VO: What did exist was a powerful idea that was about to
inspire a single, devastating act that would lead the whole
world into believing the myth that had begun to be
constructed in the Manhattan courtroom.

[ CUT TO MANHATTAN SKYLINE : WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWERS . ONE
TOWER HAS BEEN HIT , AND IS ON FIRE .]

MAN (off-camera) : What’s this other jet doing? What’s this
other jet doing?

[ OTHER EXCLAMATIONS AND SOBBING IN BACKGROUND AS SMOKE
BILLOWS FROM TOWERS ]

VO: The attack on America by 19 hijackers shocked the world.
It was Ayman Zawahiri’s new strategy, implemented in a
brutal and spectacular way. But neither he nor bin Laden
were the originators of what was called the “Planes
Operation.” It was the brainchild of an Islamist militant
called Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who came to bin Laden for
funding and help in finding volunteers. But in the wake of
panic created by the attacks, the politicians reached for
the model which had been created by the trial earlier that
year: the hijackers were just the tip of a vast,
international terrorist network which was called, “Al
Qaeda.”

[ CUT TO INTERIOR, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, UNITED STATES
CONGRESS ]

GEORGE W BUSH , PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES [ ON
SPEAKER’S PODIUM ] : Al Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is
to crime. There are thousands of these terrorists in more
than 60 countries. They are recruited from their own nations
and neighborhoods, and brought to camps in places like
Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of
terror.

[ CUT TO PENTAGON BRIEFING ROOM ]

DONALD RUMSFELD , SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: This one network, Al
Qaeda, that’s receiving so much discussion and publicity
make have activities in 50 to 60 countries, including the
United States.

[ CUT TO OTHER INTERIOR, PODIUM ]

BUSH: Our war is against networks and groups, people who
coddle them, people who try to hide them, people who fund
them. This is our calling.

VO: And the attacks had another dramatic effect: they
brought the neoconservatives back to power in America. When
George Bush first became president, he had appointed
neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, and their allies like
Donald Rumsfeld, to his administration. But their grand
vision of America�s role in the world was largely ignored by
this new r�gime.

[ TITLE : SEPTEMBER 2000 ]

[ CUT TO PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE ]

BUSH : I just don’t think it�s the role of the United States
to walk into another country and say, “We do it this way, so
should you.”

VO: But now, the neoconservatives became all-powerful,
because this terror network proved that what they had been
predicting through the 1990s was correct: that America was
at risk from terrifying new forces in a hostile world. A
small group formed that began to shape America’s response to
the attacks. At its heart were Donald Rumsfeld and Paul
Wolfowitz, along with the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and
Richard Perle, who was a senior advisor to the Pentagon. The
last time these men had been in power together was 20 years
before, under President Reagan. Back then, they had taken on
and, as they saw it, defeated a source of evil that wanted
to take over America: the Soviet Union. And now they saw
this new war on terror in the same epic terms.

RICHARD PERLE , CHAIRMAN PENTAGON DEFENSE POLICY BOARD
2001-2003: The struggle against Soviet totalitarianism was a
struggle between fundamental value questions. “Good” and
“evil” is about as effective a shorthand as I can imagine in
this regard, and there’s something rather similar going on
in the war on terror. It isn’t a war on terror, it’s a war
on terrorists who want to impose an intolerant tyranny on
all mankind, an Islamic universe in which we are all
compelled to accept their beliefs and live by their lights,
and in that sense this is a battle between good and evil.

VO: But, as previous episodes have shown, the
neoconservatives distorted and exaggerated the Soviet
threat. They created the image of a hidden, international
web of evil run from Moscow that planned to dominate the
world, when, in reality, the Soviet Union was on its last
legs, collapsing from within. Now, they did the same with
the Islamists. They took a failing movement which had lost
mass support and began to reconstruct it into the image of a
powerful network of evil, controlled from the center by bin
Laden from his lair in Afghanistan. They did this because it
fitted with their vision of America’s unique destiny to
fight an epic battle against the forces of evil throughout
the world.

VINCENT CANNISTRARO , HEAD OF COUNTER – TERRORISM , CIA ,
1988-90: What the neoconservatives are doing is taking a
concept that they developed during the competition with the
Soviet Union, i.e., Soviet Communism was evil, it wanted to
take over our country, wanted to take over our people, our
classrooms, our society. It was that kind of concept of evil
that they took—an exaggerated one, to be sure—and then apply
it to a new threat, where it didn’t apply at all, and yet it
was layered with the same kind of cultural baggage. The
policy says there’s a network, the policy says that network
is evil, they want to infiltrate our classrooms, they want
to take our society, they want all our women to wear, you
know, veils, and this is what we have to deal with and
therefore since we know it’s evil let’s just kill it, and
that will make it go away.

[ CUT TO TANKS AND VEHICLES ROLLING DOWN A ROAD IN
AFGHANISTAN ]

VO: And so the Americans set off to invade Afghanistan, to
find and destroy the heart of this network.

VO: To do this, the Americans allied themselves with a group
called the Northern Alliance. They were a loose collection
of warlords, fighting a war of resistance against the
Taliban, the Islamists who controlled Afghanistan. The
Taliban’s best troops were the thousands of foreign fighters
from the training camps who the Northern Alliance hated.

VO: And now, they took their revenge on the foreign
fighters. The Americans believed that these men were Al
Qaeda terrorists, and the Northern Alliance did nothing to
disabuse them of this, because they were paid by the
Americans for each prisoner they delivered. But the majority
of these fighters had never had anything to do with bin
Laden or international terrorism. Both they and the Taliban
were radical nationalists who wanted to create Islamist
societies in their own countries. But now, they were either
killed or taken off to Guantánamo Bay and Islamism, as an
organised movement for changing the Muslim world, was
obliterated in Afghanistan. But as it disappeared, it was
replaced by ever more extravagant fantasies about the power
and reach of the Al Qaeda network.

[ TITLE : TORA BORA ]

VO: In December, the Northern Alliance told the Americans
that bin Laden was hiding in the mountains of Tora Bora.
They were convinced they had found the heart of his
organisation.

[ EXCERPT , “MEET THE PRESS ,” NBC TV ]

TIM RUSSERT : The search for Osama bin Laden: there was
constant discussion about him hiding out in caves and I
think many times the American people have a perception that
it�s a little hole dug out of the side of a mountain.

RUSSERT : A complex. Multi-tiered. [ READING , AS LABELS ARE
DISPLAYED ON DIAGRAM ] “Bedrooms and Offices” on the top, as
you can see. “Secret Exits” on the side, and on the bottom.
“Cut Deep to Avoid Thermal Detection.” A ventilation system,
to allow people to breathe and to carry on. The entrances,
large enough to drive trucks and even tanks. Even computer
systems and telephone systems. It’s a very sophisticated
operation.

[ CUT TO STUDIO ]

RUMSFELD : Oh, you bet. This—this is serious business.
And—and there’s not one of those; there are many of those.

[ CUT TO TORA BORA , AFGHANISTAN : B-52S BOMBING MOUNTAINS
]

VO: For days, the Americans bombed the mountains of Tora
Bora with the most powerful weapons they had. The Northern
Alliance had been paid more than a million dollars for their
help and information, and now their fighters set off up the
mountains to storm bin Laden’s fortress and bring back the
Al Qaeda terrorists and their leader.

[ NORTHERN ALLIANCE SOLDIERS SEARCHING CAVE OPENINGS ]

VO: But all they found were a few small caves, which were
either empty or had been used to store ammunition. There was
no underground bunker system, no secret tunnels: the
fortress didn�t exist. The Northern Alliance did produce
some prisoners they claimed were Al Qaeda fighters, but
there was no proof of this, and one rumor was that the
Northern Alliance was simply kidnapping anyone who looked
remotely like an Arab and selling them to the Americans for
yet more money.

[ FADE TO AMERICAN FORCES IN TORA BORA ]

VO: The Americans now began to search all the caves in all
the mountains in eastern Afghanistan for the hidden Al Qaeda
network.

AMERICAN SOLDIER , SPEAKING INTO RADIO : We found a cave.
The rest of it is open. Break.

[ CUT TO INTERIOR , COMMAND POST ]

AMERICAN ARMY SERGEANT : If nobody went up to look into that
cave, people could’ve been hiding up there for days and
watching everything that we did.

VO: But then, the British arrived to help. They were
convinced they could hunt down Al Qaeda because of what they
said was their unique experience in fighting terrorism in
Northern Ireland. They could succeed where others had
failed.

BRIGADIER LANE : The hunt for Al Qaeda Taliban goes on, and
we stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States and our
other coalition allies in the global war on terrorism.

[ TITLE : FIVE WEEKS LATER ]

INTERVIEWER : But how many Al Qaeda have you captured?

LANE : We haven’t, uh, captured any Al Qaeda, but…

INTERVIEWER : And how many have you actually managed to kill
here in south-east Afghanistan?

LANE : We haven’t killed any.

[ EXCERPT , THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD : MARKETPLACE SCENE ,
SCROLL IS UNROLLED READING :
Ten thousand pieces of gold for the body of Ali Baba and the
destruction of the band of thieves.

by order of
Hulagu, Khan of the Mongols
and Ruler of Baghdad ]

[ SCENES OF MEN ON HORSEBACK JUMPING CHASMS AND ESCAPING ]

[ CUT TO CNN EXCLUSIVE VIDEO OF BIN LADEN , WAVING .]

[ FADE TO BLACK ]

[ FADE TO AFGHANISTAN EXTERIOR ]

VO: The terrible truth was that there was nothing there
because Al Qaeda as an organisation did not exist. The
attacks on America had been planned by a small group that
had come together around bin Laden in the late 90s. What
united them was an idea: an extreme interpretation of
Islamism developed by Ayman Zawahiri. With the American
invasion, that group had been destroyed, killed or
scattered. What was left was the idea, and the real danger
was the way this idea could inspire groups and individuals
around the world who had no relationship to each other. In
looking for an organisation, the Americans and the British
were chasing a phantom enemy and missing the real threat.

JASON BURKE , AUTHOR, “AL QAEDA” : I was with the Royal
Marines as they trooped around eastern Afghanistan, and
every time they got a location for a supposed Al Qaeda or
Taliban element or base, they’d turn up and there was no one
there, or there’d be a few startled shepherds, and that
struck me then as being a wonderful image to the war on
terror, because people are looking for something that isn’t
there. There is no organisation with its terrorist
operatives, cells, sleeper cells, so on and so forth. What
there is is an idea, prevalent among young, angry Muslim
males throughout the Islamic world. That idea is what poses
a threat.

[ CUT TO WASHINGTON , D.C., MONUMENTS AND SKYLINE ]

VO: But the neoconservatives were now increasingly locked
into this fantasy, and next they set out to uncover the
network in America itself.

PAUL WOLFOWITZ , US DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE : This is a
network that has penetrated into some 60 countries,
including very definitely our own, and it�s got to be rooted
out. Our intelligence priority, in many ways, is getting
after the network here in the United States first. We will
do whatever we need to do to go after these networks and
dismantle them.

[ CUT TO FLYOVER OF NEW ENGLAND TOWN ]

VO: The American government set out to search for the Al
Qaeda organisation inside its own country. Thousands were
detained as all branches of the law and the military were
told to look for terrorists.

[ CUT TO VIEW OF GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE , SAN FRANCISCO ]

CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL OFFICER : You don’t really know
what a terrorist looks like, what kind of car they drive, or
anything else, so it’s just basically everything and
everybody and anything out here.

[ CUT TO NEWS TITLE : “AMERICA UNDER ATTACK” ]

[ CUT TO SCENES OF EMERGENCY RESPONSE VEHICLES ]

VO: And, bit by bit, the government found the network: a
series of hidden cells in cities around the country from
Buffalo to Portland.

[ CUT TO PRESIDENTIAL PODIUM ]

GEORGE W BUSH : We’ve thwarted terrorists in Buffalo and
Seattle, Portland, Detroit, North Carolina, and Tampa,
Florida. We’re determined to stop the enemy before he can
strike our people.

VO: The Americans called them “sleeper cells,” and decided
that they had just been waiting to strike. But in reality
there is very little evidence that any of those arrested had
anything at all to do with terrorist plots. From Portland to
the suburb of Buffalo called Lackawanna, yet again the
Americans were chasing a phantom enemy.

DAVID COLE , PROFESSOR OF LAW , GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY : They
say “terrorist sleeper cell.” That’s what—they—they call the
Lackawanna people a terrorist sleeper cell, the Detroit
people a terrorist cell, the Portland people a terrorist
cell. But when you look at the details, the facts just don’t
support that, and they have not proved that any group within
the United States has plotted to engage in any
terrorist—uh—activity within the United States in all of the
cases that they�ve brought since 9/11.

[ CUT TO HOME VIDEO OF YOUTHS AT DISNEYLAND, CALIFORNIA ]

VO: The evidence behind all of the sleeper cell cases is
flimsy and often bizarre. This tape was one of the central
pieces of evidence in the first of the cases. It was found
in a raid on this house…

[ CUT TO EXTERIOR VIEW OF HOUSE ]

VO ... in Detroit. Four Arab men were arrested on suspicion
of being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell.

[ VIEWS OF ARREST PHOTOGRAPHS OF SUSPECTS . TITLE : DETROIT
ACCUSED ]

VO: They had been accused by another immigrant called Mr
Hmimssa. But Mr Hmimssa was, in reality, an international
con man with 12 aliases and wanted for fraud across America.

VO: Despite this, the FBI offered to reduce his sentence for
fraud if he testified against the men. And to back up Mr
Hmimssa’s allegations, the FBI turned to the videotape. On
the surface it was the innocent record of a trip to
Disneyland by a group of teenagers who had nothing to do
with the accused, but the government had discovered a hidden
and sinister purpose to the tape.

RON HANSEN , REPORTER – THE DETROIT NEWS : The government
expert who has looked into surveillance tapes—“casing
tapes,” as he referred to them—said that one of the
objectives of making these kinds of tapes is to disguise the
nature, the real purpose, of the tape, and he explained it
that the tape is made to look benign, made to look like a
tourist tape to obscure its real purpose as a tape to case
Disneyland, and that the very appearance of it as being just
a tourist tape is actually evidence that it�s not a tourist
tape.

RON HANSEN : I could never get past the fact that the tape
just looked like a tourist tape. The Disneyland ride, for
example, was a lengthy queue, people just making their way
to the ride. The camera occasionally pans to look at the
rocks on the wall, made to look like an Indiana Jones movie,
and after several minutes the camera pans across and shows a
trash can momentarily, and then continues off to look into
the crowd. The expert basically said that, by flashing on
that trash can for a moment, the people who are part of this
conspiracy to conduct these kinds of terrorist operations,
they would understand what this is all about: how to locate
a bomb in Disneyland in California.

[ CUT TO VIEW OF YOUTHS IN RESTAURANT ]

YOUTH , WAVING : Hello!

RON HANSEN : All the talking and bantering were intended to
disguise the hidden message contained within the tape.

[ CUT TO VIEW OF YOUTHS DANCING ON VIDEOTAPE ]

VO: The government was convinced that the tape was full of
hidden messages. A brief shot of a tree outside the group’s
hotel room was there, they said, to show where to place a
sniper to attack the cars on the freeway.

VO: And what looked like a camera which had accidentally
been left running was in reality a terrorist secretly
counting out distances to show others where to place a bomb.

[ CUT TO VIEW OF US AIR FORCE JET LANDING ]

VO: And the government also said that the Detroit cell was
planning to attack US military bases around the world. Yet
again, they found hidden evidence of this in a day planner
they discovered under the sofa in the house in Detroit. What
looked like doodles were in reality, they said, a plan to
attack a US base in Turkey.

WILLIAM SWOR , DEFENCE LAWYER , DETROIT SLEEPER CELL TRIAL ,
INDICATING COPY OF DRAWINGS FROM DAY PLANNER : The
government brought in its security officer from the base to
testify that she interpreted this as being the main runways.
She identified these as being AWACS airplanes and these as
being fighter jets. She said that these solid lines were
lines of fire and she also said that this down here was a
hardened bunker.

VO: But the drawings in the day planner were discovered to
have actually been the work of a madman. They were the
fantasies of a Yemeni who believed that he was the minister
of defence for the whole of the Middle East. He had
committed suicide a year before any of the accused had
arrived in Detroit, leaving the day planner lying under the
sofa in the house. Despite this, two of the accused were
found guilty. But then, the government’s only witness, Mr
Hmimssa, told two of his cellmates that he had made the
whole thing up to get his fraud charges reduced. The
terrorism convictions have now been overturned by the judge
in the case, but it was acclaimed by the President as the
first success in the war on terror at home.

[ INTERIOR , HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES , SPEAKER’S DAIS ]

GEORGE W BUSH : We have the terrorists on the run. We’re
keeping them on the run. One by one the terrorists are
learning the meaning of American justice.

[ CUT TO VIDEOTAPE , YOUTHS HAVING A PILLOW FIGHT ]

[ CUT TO BUFFALO , NEW YORK , SKYLINE ]

VO: Another case, in the city of Buffalo, New York, seemed
on the surface to be more substantial. Six young
Yemeni-Americans had gone to an Islamist training camp in
Afghanistan.

[ CUT TO AFGHANISTAN , TRAINING CAMP ]

VO: They travelled there in early 2001 and spent between 2
and 6 weeks training and being taught Islamist revolutionary
theory. Two of them even met bin Laden on one of his tours
of the camp. They then returned to the Buffalo suburb of
Lackawanna, where they lived, but they did nothing. The FBI
heard about their trip and they watched the six men around
the clock for nearly a year, but there was no suspicious
behavior.

[ CUT TO LACKAWANNA , SUBURBAN STREET ]

VO: But then, one of the men, Mr al-Bakri, went to Bahrain
and sent his friends an E-mail. It said he was going to get
married and that he wouldn’t be seeing them for awhile. The
CIA, who had been monitoring their E-mails, understood this
to be a coded message: the cell was about to launch a
suicide attack on the US Fifth Fleet.

JOHN MOLLOY , DEFENCE LAWYER , LACKAWANNA TRIAL : The FBI,
the government, took that phrase to mean something sinister.
They believed that the word “wedding” was a code. They
believed that the phrase “not seeing you anymore” indicated
that Muktar al-Bakri was a suicide bomber. The reality is
that Mr al-Bakri was in Bahrain to get married and the
reality of him getting married was that he wouldn�t be
around his friends anymore.

[ CUT TO NEWS FOOTAGE OF POLICE ]

[ CUT TO US JUSTICE DEPARTMENT PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT ]

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Good afternoon. In the past 24
hours, United States law enforcement has identified and
disrupted an Al Qaeda-trained terrorist cell on American
soil.

VO: The arrests were announced proudly by Washington as
another sleeper cell plotting an attack. But it soon became
clear that there was no evidence for this at all, other than
the E-mail.

COLE : And the best the government can point to as a sleeper
cell are these, you know, young men in Lackawanna, in New
York, who, yes, went to Afghanistan, trained in an Al Qaeda
training camp, but to all appearances had no intention to
ever take any action on the basis of that. One of them faked
an injury to try to get out early. They came back to the
United States. We had them under intensive surveillance and
we found no evidence—not one shred of evidence—that they
ever planned or intended to engage in any kind of criminal,
much less terrorist, act. That�s the best they can show for
a sleeper cell.

VO: Faced with the fact that there was no evidence, the
government quietly dropped any charges of their being a
terrorist cell. Instead, they were prosecuted simply for
having gone to the training camp, and for having bought
uniforms there. And all the other cases were even flimsier:
A group of students who supported the liberation of Kashmir
were found paint-balling in the woods of Virginia. They were
convicted of training to attack America. A group of
African-Americans from Oregon tried to go to Afghanistan to
support the Taliban but got lost in China. All these groups,
the government said, were part of a hidden and terrifying Al
Qaeda network.

SWOR : The government had a legitimate concern at the
beginning, but they let that concern, and they took it, and
they made it a panic. They had reasonable questions and took
them and made a complete fantasy out of them. They started
out with a conclusion and then filled in all the blanks to
the questions. So this was totally driven by the need—or the
desire—to have terrorists. You build this conclusion based
on this assumption, and this assumption, and this
assumption, and, sure, if you go—if you build assumptions
upon assumptions, you can go anywhere!

INTERVIEWER : It’s a work of imagination.

SWOR : It is. It’s a fantasy, and it�s a fantasy that it was
politically expedient to sell.

[ CUT TO PRESIDENTIAL PRESS CONFERENCE ]

GEORGE W BUSH : And make no mistake about it: we got a war
here just like we got a war abroad.

VO: In Britain, too, the government and most of the media
have created the overwhelming impression that there is a
hidden network of Al Qaeda sleeper cells waiting to attack.

[ CUT TO POLICE OFFICERS AT CRIME SCENE ]

VO: But, yet again, there is very little evidence for this.
Of the 664 people arrested under the Terrorism Act since
September the 11th, none of them have been convicted of
belonging to Al Qaeda. Only 3 people have so far been
convicted of having any association with any Islamist
groups, and none of those convictions were for being
involved in a terror plot; they were for fundraising, or
posessing Islamist literature. The majority of people
convicted under the Terrorism Act since September the 11th
have actually been members of Irish terrorist groups like
the UVF or the Real IRA. And many of the arrests that were
dramatically announced as being part of a hidden Al Qaeda
network were, in reality, as absurd as the cases in America.
For example, the London police swooped on a Mr Zain
ul-Abedin who they said was running an international network
for terrorist training. It turned out to be a self-defence
course for bodyguards. He called it “Ultimate Jihad
Challenge.” His only client was a security guard from a
supermarket, who wanted to learn how to defend himself
against shoplifters. Mr Zain ul-Abedin was cleared of all
charges. Then there was the Hogmanay terror cell who, it was
alleged, were planning to attack Edinburgh. All charges
against them were quietly dropped when it was revealed that
a key part of the evidence, a map that showed the targets
they were going to attack, turned out to have been left in
their flat by an Australian backpacker who had ringed the
tourist sites he wanted to see. And even the most
frightening and high profile of the plots uncovered turned
out to be without foundation. No one was ever arrested for
planning gas attacks on the London tube; it was a fantasy
that swept through the media. Just as in America, there is
no evidence yet of the terrifying and sinister network
lurking under the surface of our society which both
government and the media continually tell us is there.

BILL DURODIE : “Invention” is too string a term. I think we
projected it—um, we projected our own worst fears, and that
what we see is a fantasy that’s been created.

[ CUT TO BBC NEWS INTERVIEW ]

GOVERNMENT SPOKESMAN : Al Qaeda is a global network with
global reach.

[ CUT TO BBC NEWS READER ]

READER : The target, a deadly web of terror.

[ CUT TO BILL DURODIE IN MEETING ROOM ]

DURODIE : I’m not saying that an atrocity might not happen
on the British mainland. What I am saying is that we have an
exaggerated perception of the possibility of terrorism that
is quite disabling, and we only need to look at the evidence
to understand that the figures simply don�t bear out the way
that we have responded as a society.

[ CUT TO LONDON SKYLINE , WESTMINSTER , ETC . ]

VO: What the British and American governments have done is
both distort and exaggerate the real nature of the threat.
There are dangerous and fanatical groups around the world
who’ve been inspired by the extreme Islamist theories, and
they are prepared to use the techniques of mass terror on
civilians. The bombings in Madrid showed this only too
clearly. But this is not a new phenomenon. What is new is
the way the American and other governments have transformed
this complex and disparate threat into a simplistic fantasy
of an organised web of uniquely powerful terrorists who may
strike anywhere and at any moment. But no one questioned
this fantasy because, increasingly, it was serving the
interests of so many people. For the press, television, and
hundreds of terrorism experts, the fact that it seemed so
like fiction made it irresistible to their audiences. And
the Islamists, too, began to realise that by feeding this
media fantasy they could become a powerful organisation—if
only in people’s imaginations.

The prime mover in this was one of bin Laden’s associates,
who had been captured by the Americans. He was called Abu
Zubaydah. He began to tell his interrogators of terrifying
plots that Al Qaeda was preparing, some of which, he said,
they had copied from Hollywood movies like Godzilla, which
they had watched in Afghanistan.

[ CUT TO INTERIOR, BRIEFING ROOM ]

DR JOHN PRADOS , NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE , WASHINGTON DC :
Zubaydah told the interrogators a set of stories based on
what he thought would alarm us. He told us, for
example—coming out of a movie that had been recent at that
time, Godzilla, in which the Brooklyn Bridge was destroyed
by the monster—he told us that Al Qaeda was interested in
destroying the Brooklyn Bridge. He told us of attacks on
mass transit sources like subway trains. He told us there
were intentions of attacking apartment buildings and
shopping centers, the Statue of Liberty, all manner of
things.

JOHN ASHCROFT , ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES :
Recent intelligence reports suggest that Al Qaeda leaders
have emphasised planning for attacks on apartment buildings,
hotels, and other soft or lightly-secured targets in the
United States.

VO: And Abu Zubaydah also told his interrogators of a
terrifying new weapon the Islamists intended to use: an
explosive device that could spray radiation through cities,
the “dirty bomb.”

[ EXCERPT , CBS EVENING NEWS ]

DAN RATHER : First, a CBS News exclusive about a captured Al
Qaeda leader who says his fellow terrorists have the
know-how to build a very dangerous weapon and get it to the
United States.

VO: And the media took the bait. They portrayed the dirty
bomb as an extraordinary weapon that would kill thousands of
people, and, in the process, they made the hidden enemy even
more terrifying. But, in reality, the threat of a dirty bomb
is yet another illusion. Its aim is to spread radioactive
material through a conventional explosion, but almost all
studies of such a possible weapon have concluded that the
radiation spread in this way would not kill anybody because
the radioactive material would be so dispersed, and,
providing the area was cleaned promptly, the long-term
effects would be negligible. In the past, both the American
army and the Iraqi military tested such devices and both
concluded that they were completely ineffectual weapons for
this very reason.

ROCKWELL : Yes. And that’s been said over and over again,
but then people immediately say after that, “But, you know,
people won’t believe that, and they’ll panic.” And then all
the people working on this project, you know, the defence
and so forth, breathe a big sigh of relief because they got
their problem back: you know, we’re gonna all panic. I don�t
think it would kill anybody and I think you’ll have trouble
finding a serious report that would claim otherwise. The
Department of Energy actually set up such a test and they
actually measured what happened. And they—they—the
measurements were extremely low. They calculated that the
most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose—not
life-threatening, but fairly high—and I checked into how the
calculation was done, and they assume that after the attack,
no one moves for one year. One year. Now, that’s ridiculous.

[ CUT TO ANOTHER INTERIOR , LIVING ROOM ]

LEWIS Z KOCH , BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS : The dirty
bomb—the danger from radioactivity is basically next to
nothing. The danger from panic, however, is horrendous.
That’s where the irony comes. This—instead of the government
saying, “Look, this is not a serious weapon; the serious
danger of this is the panic that would ensue, and there is
no reason for panic. Don’t panic.”

BRITISH NARRATOR : Ladies and gentlemen, this is not the end
of our show; however, something very much like this could
happen at any moment. We just thought we ought to prepare
you and more or less put you in the mood. Thank you.
And now, back to our story.

[ CUT , CITY SKYLINE ]

VO: The scale of this fantasy just kept growing as more and
more groups realised the power it gave them—above all, the
group that had been instrumental in first spreading the
idea: the neoconservatives. Because they now found that they
could use it to help them realise their vision: that America
had a special destiny to overcome evil in the world, and
this epic mission would give meaning and purpose to the
American people.

[ CUT , INTERIOR , ROOM IN IRAQ , SADDAM HUSSEIN AND
OFFICERS ]

VO: To do this, they were going to start with Iraq, and,
just as they had discovered a hidden reality of terror
beneath the surface in America, they now found hidden links
that previously no one had suspected between the Al Qaeda
network and Saddam Hussein.

[ CUT , SPEAKER’S DAIS, UNITED STATES HOUSE OF
REPRESENTATIVES ]

GEORGE W BUSH : Evidence from intelligence sources, secret
communications, and statements by people now in custody
reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists,
including members of Al Qaeda. Imagine those 19 hijackers
with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by
Saddam Hussein.

[ CUT , OFFICE INTERIOR ]

RICHARD PERLE , CHAIRMAN, PENTAGON DEFENSE POLICY BOARD,
2001-2003: I continue to be amazed at the people who say
there are no links. It simply isn’t true. What hasn’t been
established is a direct link between Saddam’s intelligence
and the 9/11 plotters, although even there there is evidence
that suggests, very possibly, facilitation and assistance to
the 9/11 hijackers.

INTERVIEWER : There really is evidence?

PERLE : There really is evidence.

INTERVIEWER : So, when people say there is no association
between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, they�re wrong.

VO: The driving force behind these new global policies in
the war on terror was the power of a dark fantasy: a
sinister web of hidden and interlinked threats that
stretched around the world. And such was the power of that
fantasy that it also began to transform the very nature of
politics because, increasingly, politicians were discovering
that their ability to imagine the future and the terrible
dangers it held gave them a new and heroic role in the
world.

VO: In the post-War years, politicians had also used their
imaginations, but to project optimistic visions of a better
future that they could create for their people, and it was
these visions that gave them power and authority.

[ CUT , INTERIOR , DOWNING STREET : ANGLE ON TONY BLAIR ]

VO: But those dreams collapsed, and politicians like Tony
Blair became more like managers of public life, their
policies determined often by focus groups. But now, the war
on terror allowed politicians like Blair to portray a new,
grand vision of the future. But this vision was a dark one
of imagined threats, and a new force began to drive
politics: the fear of an imagined future.

[ CUT , INTERIOR, TONY BLAIR ADDRESSING AUDIENCE ]

TONY BLAIR : Not a conventional fear about a conventional
threat, but the fear that one day these new threats of
weapons of mass destruction, rogue states, and international
terrorism combine to deliver a catastrophe to our world. And
then the shame of knowing that I saw that threat, day after
day, and did nothing to stop it.

[ CUT , ANOTHER ADDRESS ]

BLAIR : It may not erupt and engulf us this month or next,
perhaps not even this year or next …

BLAIR : I just think these—these dangers are there, I think
that it’s difficult sometimes for people to see how they all
come together—I think that it’s my duty to tell it to you if
I really believe it, and I do really believe it. I may be
wrong in believing it, but I do believe it.

[ CUT , EXTERIOR , MOONLIT , DARK CITY SKYLINE ]

VO: What Blair argued was that faced by the new threat of a
global terror network, the politician�s role was now to look
into the future and imagine the worst that might happen and
then act ahead of time to prevent it. In doing this, Blair
was embracing an idea that had actually been developed by
the Green movement: it was called the “precautionary
principle.” Back in the 1980s, thinkers within the ecology
movement believed the world was being threatened by global
warming, but at the time there was little scientific
evidence to prove this. So they put forward the radical idea
that governments had a higher duty: they couldn’t wait for
the evidence, because by then it would be too late; they had
to act imaginatively, on intuition, in order to save the
world from a looming catastrophe.

[ CUT , INTERIOR , MEETING ROOM ]

DURODIE : In essence, the precautionary principle says that
not having the evidence that something might be a problem is
not a reason for not taking action as if it were a problem.
That’s a very famous triple-negative phrase that effectively
says that action without evidence is justified. It requires
imagining what the worst might be and applying that
imagination upon the worst evidence that currently exists.

BLAIR : Would Al Qaeda buy weapons of mass destruction if
they could? Certainly. Does it have the financial resources?
Probably. Would it use such weapons? Definitely.

[ CUT , INTERIOR , MEETING ROOM ]

DURODIE : But once you start imagining what could happen,
then—then there’s no limit. What if they had access to it?
What if they could effectively deploy it? What if we weren’t
prepared? What it is is a shift from the scientific, “what
is” evidence-based decision making to this speculative,
imaginary, “what if”-based, worst case scenario.

[ CUT , EXTERIOR , CAMP X-RAY , Guant�namo Bay, Cuba ]

VO: And it was this principle that now began to shape
government policy in the war on terror. In both America and
Britain, individuals were detained in high-security prisons,
not for any crimes they had committed, but because the
politicians believed—or imagined—that they might commit an
atrocity in the future, even though there was no evidence
they intended to do this. The American attorney general
explained this shift to what he called the “paradigm of
prevention.”

[ CUT , INTERIOR , HEARING ROOM , UNITED STATES CONGRESS ]

ASHCROFT : We had to make a shift in the way we thought
about things, so being reactive, waiting for a crime to be
committed, or waiting for there to be evidence of the
commission of a crime didn’t seem to us to be an appropriate
way to protect the American people.

[ CUT , INTERIOR , OFFICE ]

DAVID COLE : Under the preventive paradigm, instead of
holding people accountable for what you can prove that they
have done in the past, you lock them up based on what you
think or speculate they might do in the future. And how—how
can a person who’s locked up based on what you think they
might do in the future disprove your speculation? It’s
impossible, and so what ends up happening is the government
short-circuits all the processes that are designed to
distinguish the innocent from the guilty because they simply
don’t fit this mode of locking people up for what they might
do in the future.

VO: The supporters of the precautionary principle argue that
this loss of rights is the price that society has to pay
when faced by the unique and terrifying threat of the Al
Qaeda network. But, as this series has shown, the idea of a
hidden, organised web of terror is largely a fantasy, and by
embracing the precautionary principle, the politicians have
become trapped in a vicious circle: they imagine the worst
about an organisation that doesn�t even exist. But no one
questions this because the very basis of the precautionary
principle is to imagine the worst without supporting
evidence, and, instead, those with the darkest imaginations
become the most influential.

[ CUT , INTERIOR , RESTAURANT ]

DAVID JOHNSTON , INTELLIGENCE SPECIALIST , NEW YORK TIMES :
You’ll hear about meetings where terrorist matters are
discussed in the intelligence community, and always the
person with the most dire assessment, the person with
the—who has the, kind of, the strongest sense that something
should be done will frequently carry the day at meetings. We
thus believe the most dire estimate of what could happen
here. The sense of disbelief has vanished.

INTERVIEWER : So the person with the most vivid imagination
becomes the most powerful.

JOHNSTON : In a sense, that’s correct.

[ CUT , INTERIOR , FBI OFFICE ]

FBI OFFICIAL : We knew that Al Qaeda’s tentacles were
beginning to become far-reaching.

[ CUT , INTERIOR , BRITISH MEETING ROOM ]

BRITISH OFFICIAL : There will be an attack. It is “when”
within the United Kingdom; I think the “if” is academic.

[ CUT , TONY BLAIR AT PODIUM , ADDRESSING AUDIENCE ]

BLAIR : It is only a matter of time, and its potential is
huge.

[ EXCERPT , GODZILLA: WALL OF WATER SLAMS INTO CITY ]

[ CUT , INTERIOR , RESTAURANT ]

JOHNSTON : How will we ever know when it’s over? How will we
ever know when the threat is gone? In the mindset we are now
in, once we declare it to be over will be exactly the time
that we believe that they will strike.

[ CUT , BRITISH NEWSSTAND ]

NEWS VENDOR : You know, uh, it’s just—it’s the way we live
today. We’re living on a knife edge.

[ CUT , AERIAL VIEW OF LONDON , FOLLOWED BY SCENES OF
DISASTERS , ETC ]

VO: This story began over 30 years ago as the dream that
politics could create a better world began to fall apart.
Out of that collapse came two groups: the Islamists and the
neoconservatives. Looking back, we can now see that these
groups were the last political idealists who, in an age of
growing disillusion, tried to reassert the inspirational
power of political visions that would give meaning to
people’s lives.

[ CUT, VIEW OF ARABIC CROWD ]

[ SUBTITLES OVER CROWD SCENES: We will fight for an Islamic
state, we will die for it.]

[ CUT , PAUL WOLFOWITZ ENTERING PRESS BRIEFING ROOM ]

VO: But both have failed in their attempts to transform the
world and, instead, together they have created today’s
strange fantasy of fear which politicians have seized on.
Because in an age when all the grand ideas have lost
credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians
have left to maintain their power.

[ CUT , INTERIOR , HALL , REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION ]

BUSH : And we have seen Americans in uniform storming
mountain strongholds and charging through sandstorms. We
have fought the terrorists across the earth because the
lives of our citizens are at stake. And America and the
world are safer.

[ CUT , INTERIOR , HALL , DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION ]

JOHN KERRY , UNITED STATES SENATOR AND PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATE: The stakes are high. We are a nation at war, a
global war on terror against unlike we’ve ever known
before….

[ CUT , RNC ]

BUSH : Faced with that choice I will defend America every
time.

[ CUT , ANGLE ON CHEERING CROWDS OF REPUBLICANS ]

[ CUT , INTERIOR , MEETING ROOM ]

DURODIE : In a society that believes in nothing, fear
becomes the only agenda. Whilst the 20th century was
dominated between a conflict between a free-market Right and
a socialist Left, even though both of those outlooks had
their limitations and their problems, at least they believed
in something, whereas what we are seeing now is a society
that believes in nothing. And a society that believes in
nothing is particularly frightened by people who believe in
anything, and, therefore, we label those people as
fundamentalists or fanatics, and they have much greater
purchase in terms of the fear that they instill in society
than they truly deserve. But that’s a measure of how much we
have become isolated and atomised rather than of their
inherent strength.

[ CUT , EXTERIOR DOWNING STREET , TONY BLAIR WALKING TOWARD
DOOR ]

VO: But the fear will not last, and just as the dreams that
politicians once promised turned out to be illusions, so,
too, will the nightmares, and then our politicians will have
to face the fact that they have no visions, either good or
bad, to offer us any longer.

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